What are you currently playing?

[Worgen]

I didn't hate my time with it, but it does make me wonder how the heck Resident Evil managed to become the major franchise that it is, since the games were kind of bad until RE4. After you finish the game you unlock the Battle Game mode, where you can run around and kill enemies with infinite ammo, and like, what's even the point? Yeah, I came here for the tank control, auto-aim combat! Give me more of that! Anyway, I'm glad I've finally finished it after 20 years. What should I play next, I wonder?

Because of Resident Evil 1,2 and 3. It was already established by the time Code Veronica came out.

Playing Darktide. Its fun, but they kinda fucked themselves with the dlc cosmetics since most of the stuff you earn by playing is kinda lame and mostly recolors, so I can see it lacking long term, but for now its fun.

 

[Drathnoxis]

Because of Resident Evil 1,2 and 3. It was already established by the time Code Veronica came out.

But those games were kind of bad too.

 

[BrawlMan]

But those games were kind of bad too.

No. I will argue that vanilla US/EU/UK RE1 has aged horribly. If you're playing the non-dual shock Director's Cut (the one without the soundtrack replacement), it's more bearable and less tedious. Don't be shitting on RE1 Remake either. People like to shoot zombies, mutants, and other sci-fi monstrosities. There is a reason why this franchise did so well before RE4 skyrocketed the series to greater heights.

 

[Buyetyen]

Currently playing Persona 5 Royal and really enjoying it. Just wish the game offered a little more flexibility when it comes to time slots and activities.

 

[NerfedFalcon]

Currently playing Persona 5 Royal and really enjoying it. Just wish the game offered a little more flexibility when it comes to time slots and activities.

It opens up a lot the further you get into it.

 

[Worgen]

But those games were kind of bad too.

No, as Brawlman has said, they aged kinda badly, but they were awesome back in the day.

 

[meiam]

Currently playing Persona 5 Royal and really enjoying it. Just wish the game offered a little more flexibility when it comes to time slots and activities.

No your too tired from talking to your friend for 5 minutes to do something in the evening, you gotta go to bed right now.

If you care about doing all the time activity before the end game, its a good idea to look up some of the social link and their bonus, some of them have massive impact on how much you can do.

 

[Johnny Novgorod]

Still plucking away at Ragnarok, 40 hours in. I'm well past the point where I just wanna know how the story ends but also I'm compelled to comb over every single distraction the game comes up with. Also because the open areas tend to be more fun than the "main" parts (60-70% of the game feels like hallways).

 

[Thaluikhain]

Starflight, the version for the Sega Genesis from 1991. On an emulator, naturally. Earlier versions had terrible, headache inducing 4 colour graphics. Weird how long EA has been around.

 

[Zykon TheLich]

Playing Darktide. Its fun, but they kinda fucked themselves with the dlc cosmetics since most of the stuff you earn by playing is kinda lame and mostly recolors, so I can see it lacking long term, but for now its fun.

How have you found it stability wise? I've heard a lot of bad things about crashes, ridiculous load times etc

The sororitas DLC released for Inquisitor Martyr/Prophecy, so I reinstalled the game and slogged through a level to remind myself what an uninteresting chore it is to play so I don't waste any money on the DLC, even if the sororitas looks badass.

 

[Bedinsis]

Starflight, the version for the Sega Genesis from 1991. On an emulator, naturally. Earlier versions had terrible, headache inducing 4 colour graphics. Weird how long EA has been around.

It is available on GOG.

 

[Old_Hunter_77]

Well I'm not really clicking with Castlevania or XCom, which is not a surprise but I don't regret buying and trying them because they were on major sales.
So I'm taking a break from gaming this weekend and I'll pick it back up when my Steam Deck arrives, scheduled for delivery tomorrow.

The first game I will try is Dragon's Dogma: Dark Arisen. I already have it in my library, I bought it a while ago and started it but the combat was confusing and I didn't really love navigating that world. However, I am in the mood for a meaty fantasy RPG, the sequel is coming out (eventually?), and my interest was rekindled when I read about how the inspiration for the game was the devs wanting to add more interesting combat to the fantasy RPG genre, which I respect (like, it just boggle my mind that Skyrim is so beloved with such basic boring combat but Witcher 3 is criticized for its combat).

And it was only quitting Dogma when I played Shadows of Colossus, a game the combat in DD has been compared to. I liked Shadow, so perhaps I am in a better head space to dig into Dogma. Will be curious to see if the handheld experience encourages play.

 

[Worgen]

How have you found it stability wise? I've heard a lot of bad things about crashes, ridiculous load times etc

The sororitas DLC released for Inquisitor Martyr/Prophecy, so I reinstalled the game and slogged through a level to remind myself what an uninteresting chore it is to play so I don't waste any money on the DLC, even if the sororitas looks badass.

The load times are kinda long, especially considering the ssd I have it on. It does crash somewhat regularly, but at least you can rejoin a team. Performance has gotten better after a few patches, but still doesn't really feel like where it should be. Despite all that its still fun though, for now.

 

[Chimpzy]

Having at Triangle Strategy. Expected Final Fantasy Tactics with serial number filed off. Got politics, religious persecution, classism, corruption. So ... Final Fantasy Tactics.

 

[laggyteabag]

I finished up playing Telltale's Guardians of the Galaxy, and it was fine, I guess.

It wasn't good, it wasn't bad, it was entirely average, and frankly, kind of boring. Its not like you can buy it anymore anyway, but I wouldn't recommend it even if you could.

The first couple of episodes were fine, and there were a few entertaining moments (mostly those that included licensed music), but it kind of lost its footing afterwards, and it was a bit of a drag to get myself to try to complete it.

On a somewhat related note, I have also started playing the 2021 Square Enix Guardians of the Galaxy, and compared to the Telltale version, it is just a night and day difference. I mean obviously this is an apples to oranges comparison: the Telltale game is a narrative-driven talk-em-up, whereas the Square Enix version is some weird hybrid between a third person shooter, and a character action game. But even so, the Telltale game relies entirely on its characters, and the quality of its writing, but the Square Enix game just trumps it in every regard, and comes with a bucket load more energy to boot.

One thing that I have noticed, is that these characters just don't stop talking, more so than I have ever experienced in any other game. They are always having conversations with each other, spewing out combat dialogue, or just generally bickering/complaining. This is a really energetic interpretation of these characters, and they are a lot of fun to be around.

The game itself is decent enough. Combat encounters aren't organically placed around the level, but instead you are often dropped into combat arenas to fight a few waves of goons, or a boss enemy. You strafe around enemies (there isn't any cover), dodging attacks, and shoot enemies with your pistols, whilst using your own/other Guardian's abilities on-cooldown.

Im excited to finish it off, but so far it is a pretty solid experience.

Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy: Xbox Play Anywhere

I'm playing through the very beginning and already had 2 irritating things happen:
1) I was told to follow Rocket. Well, he wasn't going anywhere. So I walked around some, collected some stuff and only then after returning to him did he move on.
2) He enters a place I'd have to crouch to get into. There is no crouch button. In 2022. I was supposed to walk around the obstruction. To do so, for a time, I wasn't following Rocket.

I hope the bulk of the game doesn't have these kinds of issues.

I have noticed that this game is also quite buggy.

On the first level I got stuck on some terrain and had to reload from the last checkpoint.

During the puzzle tutorial where you can ask Drax to move boxes around that you can jump on, if I asked him to move the box before the dialogue ended, he wouldn't do it, and I couldn't ask him again - which required another reload to last checkpoint.

I've had it a couple of times where the game has inexplicably locked itself to 40FPS which I could only resolve by restarting the game (though I am streaming it from my main PC to my Steam Deck, which might have something to do with it?).

I had this one issue where I was given a prompt to respond to a conversation, but because I was in the middle of a scripted interaction (opening a crate, I think?), it A) locked me out of responding, causing me to miss the prompt, and B) left the dialogue window on my screen until I reloaded from the last checkpoint.

And curiously, the game has been displaying both Xbox and PS button prompts simultaneously, which has been super weird.

This is probably the buggiest game that I have played in a while, so it is a shame that it looks like support for this game has ended, and it has been left in this state. I am definitely enjoying the game, but the bugs leave a pretty large dent on what is otherwise an enjoyable experience.

 

[hanselthecaretaker]

The third weapon in Ragnarok is really cool, and a thoughtful way of rounding out Kratos’s arsenal. I love how you can even use it as a callback to some of the old school kind of platforming from the classic games. Plus it’s the most fun way to unlock the rune chests. Brok and Kratos are fun together too.

Sonofabitch this game just keeps getting better and better.

 

[Casual Shinji]

The third weapon in Ragnarok is really cool, and a thoughtful way of rounding out Kratos’s arsenal. I love how you can even use it as a callback to some of the old school kind of platforming from the classic games. Plus it’s the most fun way to unlock the rune chests. Brok and Kratos are fun together too.

Sonofabitch this game just keeps getting better and better.

It makes the axe throwing almost completely superfluous. Also, the detonation ability can knock even Bosses out of heavy duty attacks. And said ability makes the Blades' triangle charge attacks even more lame than they already were.

 

[Bartholen]

I've been recently playing Mechanicus again. This time I turned the difficulty up to Hard and added some additional difficulty modifiers. I'm still effortlessly steamrolling the game for the most part. While I do appreciate how extensive the difficulty customization is, it mostly seems to just make the dungeon crawls longer, not harder. Yes, the challenge in the dungeons escalates faster and enemies gain more health and reanimate quicker, but since healing is practically unlimited, it turns into a war of attrition as you hunker in a corner healing and smack down enemies that reanimate. The fact that there are no fewer than three separate abilities that allow you to instantly recharge your action point bar absolutely rips the game's balance in half as you can go supernova basically right from the word go in every encounter. There's almost never an incentive not to use all your abilities in one turn for maximum effectiveness.

Now that I also know how to play the game, I've noticed it's even more unbalanced than I previously thought. There are abilities that allow you to use certain support items for a lesser cost... but you can easily gain the abilities far earlier than any of the items, making the abilities pointless for long stretches of the game. The different skill trees are just ruinously unbalanced: one is more melee-focused, but it's hopelessly outclassed by the one whose capstone ability is instantly refilling the action point gauge, allowing for double mega death lasers in a single turn. There's a tree focused on buffing your troops units, but using your servo-skulls is almost always more useful for collecting action points.

All of this, and the fact that the game is just plain slow. As in, it literally progresses slowly, both in the dungeon crawls, combat and ship menus. When applying skill upgrades you always have to go back to the menu after each one. In dungeon crawls there's an odd delay when moving between rooms. But combat could massively benefit from a 1,5x speed option. There's no way to speed up movement, and transitions between different phases take just that tiny bit longer than they should to make it annoying. The dungeon crawls also become longer and longer as the game progresses, which in conjunction with the difficulty modifier of additional combat encounter means that a single crawl can easily take up 2 hours.

It's a good thing the core gameplay is still very solid and enjoyable because damn, this game really needed more development time.

But the big game I've been playing is Bloons Tower Defense 5. I bought it a week ago, and just uninstalled it. Because holy fuck, this game can legit be life-ruining. I racked up 20 hours in just a week, and could continue to do so unto infinity. It's a sort of remnant from the casual flash game era, and it's basically the final ultimate form of that type of game: mindless but satisfying, time-devouring but engaging, graphically on the level of a flash game, but executed with the perfect stylish visuals, bright colors and swooshy effects to make your monkey brain (heh) go "ooga ooga". The amount of content on display is just astronomical with I don't even know how many maps, 4 difficulty settings for each one, ability to play tracks in reverse, special challenge modes, random missions, customization to emphasize certain towers, long-term upgrades... this game took up easily triple digits worth of hours of my life in high school, and I'm starting to see what a mistake that was.

 

[RhombusHatesYou]

The sororitas DLC released for Inquisitor Martyr/Prophecy, so I reinstalled the game and slogged through a level to remind myself what an uninteresting chore it is to play so I don't waste any money on the DLC, even if the sororitas looks badass.

The sororitas is a decent class. The banners, acts of faith and Exalted Saint Mode mix shit up a bit, especially if you like setting things on fire because ESM is all about burning the fuck out of everything. The combo weapons are good-ish, cutting a lot of bullshit out of equipping 2 1-handed weapons...

But if you ignore all that it's mostly playing the Crusader with a pair of tits (and no heavy weapons).

 

[NerfedFalcon]

Genshin Impact's next major update, 3.3, is a couple of days away, and for the first time since the developers started putting up two 5-star characters at once and letting you pick which one to aim for, I'm genuinely considering both of them as viable options. Itto is a known quantity, a great character and a strong unit who I have every teammate and weapon to help succeed. But Wanderer is brand new and one of the most anticipated promoted-to-playable characters in the game; while I don't like him as much in the story so far, the latest MSQ made me rethink my position on him a little bit, and the new quest could do that again.

Obviously the chance still exists that I won't get either, especially since I'm dedicated to not spending money on one-time gacha packs - the only money I spend is on the "subscription", and that's all I'll ever spend on it. (Save the lectures about predatory monetization, I made my peace with that demon long ago.) And that isn't even necessarily bad, since the characters announced to be coming after those two are Raiden (who I have already, so a non-issue) and Ayato (another rerun I've been hotly anticipating). And it's not just new characters joining the roster, but potentially a new area and definitely a new minigame too, and it looks really interesting. Once again, Genshin's about to take over another couple of weeks of my life, it looks like.

Meanwhile, I finally got my Minecraft farm established, found some iron (which I swear is a lot harder than it used to be), and even a set of diamonds, either above or not far into the negative Y coordinates (sea level is Y=63 I believe). I even found a ruined portal near my base with exactly enough obsidian in the chest to repair it, meaning I don't have to build my own by mining for more diamonds and obsidian. Everything's coming up Falcon; an opinion I'll probably revise as soon as I go into the Nether and die instantly.